HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Model

🌐Project Page | ✍️Paper(Arxiv) | 🎥Demo

Jiaming Liu, Hao Chen, Pengju An, Zhuoyang Liu, Renrui Zhang, Chenyang Gu, Xiaoqi Li, Ziyu Guo, Sixiang Chen, Mengzhen Liu, Chengkai Hou, Mengdi Zhao, KC alex Zhou, Pheng-Ann Heng, Shanghang Zhang

🤖 HybridVLA innovatively integrates diffusion and autoregressive action prediction within a single LLM, fully leveraging the continuity and probabilistic nature of diffusion alongside the reasoning capabilities of autoregressive modeling. It undergoes pretraining on large, diverse, cross-embodied real-world robotic datasets and is further fine-tuned on both simulation and self-collected real-world data. HybridVLA achieves remarkable performance across various tasks, demonstrating strong generalization to unseen manipulated objects, backgrounds, spatial positions, and lighting conditions.

✨ News ✨

• [2025/04/20] We have updated the test script and configuration, and have also open-sourced the RLBench environment (similar to lift3D).🚀
• [2025/03/20] The training config and script is released now!🚀
• [2025/03/13] HybridVLA is now live on arXiv! The pre-trained checkpoint on a large-scale robotic dataset has also been released.🚀

📦 Installation

The code is built using Python 3.10, we also recommand to use Python above Python 3.10. We require PyTorch >= 2.2.0 and CUDA >= 12.0 (It may run with lower versions, but we have not tested it). We recommend using Miniconda and create an environment as follows:

conda create --name hybridvla python=3.10

Next, clone our repo and install the required packages with the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/PKU-HMI-Lab/Hybrid-VLA
cd Hybrid-VLA
pip install -e .

If you need to use the traning code, please also install the Flash Attention:

# Training additionally requires Flash-Attention 2 (https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention)
pip install packaging ninja

# Verify Ninja --> should return exit code "0"
ninja --version; echo $?

# Install Flash Attention 2
# =>> If you run into difficulty, try `pip cache remove flash_attn` first
pip install "flash-attn==2.5.5" --no-build-isolation

🧩 Framework

Our code is built based on OpenVLA and CogACT and is organized in the following framework:

• conf: config files for hydridvla training
• scripts: scripts for training and testing
• training: contains strategies for training
• models: contains hybridvla models, including backbone & diffusion & vlm & vla
• util: contains different kinds of tools funtion
• vla: from openvla's vla structure, including action tokenizer, etc.

💡Getting Started

We release our pretrained model's parameters as follows:

• Robotic Large-Scale Pretrained Checkpoint
• Simulation-Finetuned Checkpoint

Our model requires PIL image and text prompt as input, please refer to the code below for the minimal inference :

# also see scripts/test_toy.py
from PIL import Image
from vla import load_vla
import torch
import numpy as np
import time

model = load_vla(
        '<absolute-path-to-ckpt>',
        load_for_training=False,
        future_action_window_size=0,
        use_diff=True, # choose weither to use diff
        action_dim=7,
        )

# (Optional) use "model.vlm = model.vlm.to(torch.bfloat16)" to load vlm in bf16

model.to('cuda:0').eval()

example_image: Image.Image = Image.open('<path-to-Hybrid-VLA>/assets/000.png') 
example_prompt = "close the laptop"
example_cur_robot_state = np.array([ 0.27849028, -0.00815899,  1.47193933, -3.14159094,  0.24234043,  3.14158629,  1.        ])
actions_diff, actions_ar, _ = model.predict_action(
            front_image=example_image,
            instruction=example_prompt,
            unnorm_key = 'rlbench',
            cfg_scale = 0.0, 
            use_ddim = True,
            num_ddim_steps = 4,
            action_dim = 7,
            cur_robot_state = example_cur_robot_state,
            predict_mode = 'diff+ar' # or 'ar' or 'diff'
            )
    
print(actions_diff)

Fully Fine-Tuning

To fully fine-tune the pretrained models, we use PyTorch Fully Sharded Data Parallel(FSDP).The training script used is from CogACT.

First, download our pretrain model, and change --pretrained_checkpoint to your local ckpt absolute path.

Next, create a Hugging Face user access token and export the token value. Make sure your token have right access to llama2-7b repo.

# create .hf_token file and put your user access token in.
cd <path-to-Hybrid-VLA>
vim .hf_token

Then launch the training script. We use one node with 8 A100 GPUs as an example.

# parameter
export PYTHONPATH=<path-to-Hybrid-VLA>:$PYTHONPATH

FUTURE_ACTION_STEPS=0
SETTING=<training-setting>
FREEZE_VISON=true
FREEZE_LLM=false
LOAD_DIT=false
ACTION_TOKENIZER_EXIST=true
USE_DIFF=true
AR_DIFF_LOSS=true
REPEATED_DIFFUSION_STEPS=4
CLASS_DROPOUT_PROB=0.0

DATA_MIX=rlbench
TASK=<your-task-name>
NUM_GPUS=8
NODES=1
BATCH_SIZE=32
EPOCHS=300
LEARNING_RATE=2e-5
ACTION_DIM=7

DATA_ROOT=<your-rlds-data>
EXP_ROOT=<runs-dir> #for example, ./runs
# launch
torchrun --standalone --nnodes ${NODES} --nproc-per-node ${NUM_GPUS} train.py \
  --vla.type prism-dinosiglip-224px+oxe+diffusion \
  --vla.data_mix ${DATA_MIX} \
  --vla.base_vlm prism-dinosiglip-224px+7b \
  --need_to_sub 0 \
  --vla.expected_world_size $((${NUM_GPUS} * ${NODES})) \
  --vla.per_device_batch_size ${BATCH_SIZE} \
  --vla.global_batch_size $((${NUM_GPUS} * ${NODES} * ${BATCH_SIZE})) \
  --vla.learning_rate ${LEARNING_RATE} \
  --vla.epochs ${EPOCHS} \
  --vla.freeze_vision_backbone ${FREEZE_VISON} \
  --vla.freeze_llm_backbone ${FREEZE_LLM} \
  --data_root_dir ${DATA_ROOT}/${TASK} \
  --run_root_dir ${EXP_ROOT} \
  --run_id exp_${TASK}_${SETTING} \
  --image_aug false \
  --wandb_project hybridvla \
  --wandb_entity <your-w&b-account> \
  --save_interval 100 \
  --action_dim ${ACTION_DIM} \
  --repeated_diffusion_steps ${REPEATED_DIFFUSION_STEPS} \
  --action_tokenizer_exist ${ACTION_TOKENIZER_EXIST} \
  --future_action_window_size ${FUTURE_ACTION_STEPS} \
  --class_dropout_prob ${CLASS_DROPOUT_PROB} \
  --use_diff ${USE_DIFF} \
  --ar_diff_loss ${AR_DIFF_LOSS} \
  --is_resume False \
  --pretrained_checkpoint <absolute-path-to-ckpt>

🔍Test in RLBench

We evaluated our hybridvla in RLBench, which based on the CoppeliaSim simulator. Install the virtual environment for testing in RLBench according to the following steps and begin your test. Thanks to the amazing work LIFT3D.

conda create --name hybridvla_test python=3.11
conda activate hybridvla_test

cd Hybrid-VLA
pip install -r test_env_requirements.txt
pip install git+https://github.com/moojink/dlimp_openvla@040105d256bd28866cc6620621a3d5f7b6b91b46
pip install git+https://github.com/arnoldland/openvla@5603207085d55148682e2a35b868ad77d7b42ece

export COPPELIASIM_ROOT=${HOME}/CoppeliaSim
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$COPPELIASIM_ROOT
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM_PLUGIN_PATH=$COPPELIASIM_ROOT

wget https://downloads.coppeliarobotics.com/V4_1_0/CoppeliaSim_Edu_V4_1_0_Ubuntu20_04.tar.xz
mkdir -p $COPPELIASIM_ROOT && tar -xf CoppeliaSim_Edu_V4_1_0_Ubuntu20_04.tar.xz -C $COPPELIASIM_ROOT --strip-components 1
rm -rf CoppeliaSim_Edu_V4_1_0_Ubuntu20_04.tar.xz

cd LIFT3D/third_party/RLBench
pip install -e .
cd ../../..

cd LIFT3D
pip install -e .
cd ..

See the scripts/sim.py for more details.

We have documented the test results: Test_Result. For more implementation details, please see test.sh and scripts/sim.py.

📜️ License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

📚 BibTeX

@misc{liu2025hybridvlacollaborativediffusionautoregression,
      title={HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Model}, 
      author={Jiaming Liu and Hao Chen and Pengju An and Zhuoyang Liu and Renrui Zhang and Chenyang Gu and Xiaoqi Li and Ziyu Guo and Sixiang Chen and Mengzhen Liu and Chengkai Hou and Mengdi Zhao and KC alex Zhou and Pheng-Ann Heng and Shanghang Zhang},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2503.10631},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10631}, 
}